Chapter 5

We only lost a week of exploration time, I was able to recover the pearls to reuse their position in space once the new probes were complete. Except for the three pearls from IP2, they were just gone. That gave me good data on what could destroy them. I knew I could convert them to energy, erasing them, without having to use another pearl to work through, or have it within my range, I had the same ability to transfer a Me into a slot or absorb back to energy without having to work thru a secondary connection. That was why I was willing to risk sending pearls that connected back to Earth into space, I could remotely close the door on them. The earlier worry of storing someone and their pearl was mostly unfounded anxiety.

IP5 resumed its predecessor’s journey to Toliman. IP6 headed out to Bernard’s Star from Earth, IP7 became the new durability tester, running around the Sol system, dropping pearls outside the oort cloud. IP8 returned to its slow boat trip to Luhman 16 from Proxima. The energy distribution pearl system itself needed repair, inside the pocket dimension, but the ejection of hot copper out the portal interface didn’t damage anything on Mercury. The power supply was a critical feature of our probes, as time sped up for the probe its external power requirements increased to meet the higher usage.

We had power to spare, and I was even selling some of it. I had bought a small natural gas powered generation plant that needed upgrades and repairs. Robert was the new CEO of ZZ America, a holding company that had purchased the shuttered facility, arranged for new paint on the exterior, and repairing the fencing. Then we connected up a power pearl, and started feeding power into the grid.

The local utility company was pleased to have the 100 megawatt OCGT power plant back online, and didn’t ask any questions provided it passed pollution monitoring, and kept providing power to the local grid at the same price as before. I used my power to reforge the two 50MW turbines back into top shape just in case we ever had to run them, but it wasn’t in the plan. The facility had been built for remote operation, so we didn’t even have to hire staff for onsite work.

If we got inspected, we simply showed them the capacitor bank, and explained that we were currently running on stored battery power. Then we would show off all the installed solar power, covering the entire property, and brag about how we produced less carbon than previously, while also providing faster response time to even out the grid. Much of the local generation was wind, so occasional dips in generation had to be made up for, and we could do so faster than anyone else. No one ever asked why we always ran so quiet. Unnoticed is rarely remarked upon.

I, as Robert, now had a small office in the Bronx, near his apartment, where he and his secretary looked for similar sites around the country to replicate the success of the first acquisition.

IP5 arrived safely in Toliman to discover a wide asteroid belt, but no planets. Considering the distance between the A & B it had been considered unlikely that planets could form. There were three distinct belts, one thick one around each star, starting at about 2au and extending out for about 5au, and a third belt that circled both stars that was thinner, but was 15au wide. The outer belt had significant ice deposits, while the inner belts, which passed between the stars, had few volatiles remaining.

The two stars of Alpha and Beta Centauri, officially Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman, had little going for them, other than being Sol type stars. Proxima had the advantage of being a tiny dwarf star that would live for a few trillion years, and a planet to land on. I could see the development of a space based civilization around these three stars, using A and B to provide raw materials to construct the space habitats around them.

At Proxima Station Tyr came up with an idea for ground based telescopes on the nearly airless night side of Proxima B, to increase the observable universe. His design showed a ring of telescopes stationed 1000km darkward from the fixed day/night line on the surface. On the night side there was minimal frozen gases on the surface which was mostly bare rock. The circumference of the ring was 30,000km, and he had 30 telescopes equally spaced 1000km apart around that line.

“The super Hubble attached to the station is very good, but for a true stellar investigation a linked array of telescopes would be much better. The structures could be kept warm enough, if necessary, for the equipment by using deep geothermal wells, and with the abundant power on the day side, night side can become a single massive distributed telescope.”

“I applaud the idea, but what about the other kinds of telescopes?” I told him.

He looked around at everyone gathered at the conference table. We had designated habitat orb 1 as the new stellar cartography command center as the microG cylinder was only useful for working on equipment that ran the increasingly sophisticated super Hubble, including the increasingly sophisticated image processing hardware.

The result was that even though we all had our own living quarters with home offices, we tended to meet together here at the ‘Office’ everyday. It was so popular, that I had moved the entire exploration control center there. Without a greenhouse, habitation sphere #1 had the room. The move had also meant the relocation of the urchin to an L2 orbit around the massive Proxima D, with the Proxima B solar installation running the whole operation instead of Mercury.

Tyr smiled at my question, and went to the next slide of his power point presentation. 28 giant radio dishes made a circle a further 1000km inward, also spread 1000km from each other. They were the stationary kind, like at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

“The cold actually improves the sensitivity of the electronics. But the positioning means that they can cover 90% of the sky every 11.2 days.”

His next slide made everyone gasp. “But once we have one telescope planet, why stop there?”

The screen showed an animation of three planets in orbit around Proxima, they were marked as B1, B2, B3. They were in some strange harmonic resonance, and all orbiting on a different plane. It reminded me of illustrations of electrons orbiting a nucleus.

“That won’t work,” Odin said.

“Sure it will, the boss will use the outer two planets as raw material to conjure duplicates of B. The harmonic movement means that the orbits are no longer in strictly defined planes, which means that no part of the sky is ever uncovered for more than a couple days. It’s the ultimate telescopic super project!”

“Very nice presentation Tyr, now we need to see about getting your meds checked,” Ishtar teased.

He didn’t even blush, just stuck his chin out defiantly. I looked around at the grins of the others. “So, what does this megaproject need?”

“A dozen astrophysicist’s”

“A larger Proxima Station.”